Ministry of Social Solidarity Launches Diploma in Visual Disability
Oct 18, 2024
The Ministry of Social Solidarity has announced its launch of Egypt's first postgraduate diploma specialising in visual disability. The programme hopes to expand the number of professionals in the country to advise policy on how to better integrate the visually impaired, and to expand the study of best practice regarding movement and education for them. The diploma will be taught with curricula from Western Michigan University in the USA, and will be taught in Arabic at Nile University.
The ministry's Ataa Fund is involved in furthering equal education opportunities for the visually impaired, training school children in movement and mobility through the use of white canes.
In efforts to provide equal access at universities, Ataa Fund has also installed 440 metre palm walkers at five faculties at Zagazig University to ensure their movement is not obstructed. The fund is involved further in 70 schools in Assiut and Cairo, ensuring the availability of white canes and other technology to help the visually impaired, and training school children to read and write using Braille.
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CairoScene
5 days ago
- CairoScene
Grand Mosque Expands Accessibility for Worshippers With Disabilities
The Grand Mosque in Makkah has introduced expanded accessibility measures, enhancing mobility and comfort for worshippers with physical, visual, or auditory impairments. The General Authority for the Care of the Two Holy Mosques has announced a set of upgrades at the Grand Mosque in Makkah aimed at improving access for worshippers with disabilities. The initiative includes new ramps, wheelchair lanes, and elevators designed for individuals with mobility challenges. Both manual and electric wheelchairs are being provided free of charge to support movement across the site. For worshippers with visual impairments, Qurans printed in Braille have been made available, along with navigational support in the form of guidance symbols and sensory pathways. Dedicated restrooms and prayer areas have also been adapted to meet a wider range of physical needs, incorporating updated technologies and tools such as hearing aids. Additional improvements include clear signage, marked pathways, directional guides, and informational stickers to help worshippers locate accessible services. The upgrades are part of an ongoing effort to ensure the Grand Mosque remains inclusive and comfortable for all visitors.
Al-Ahram Weekly
31-07-2025
- Al-Ahram Weekly
Translating logic and hunting poems - Culture - Al-Ahram Weekly
The Library of Arabic Literature published by New York University Press in Abu Dhabi celebrated its tenth anniversary two years ago with events designed to reflect on the past successes and future directions of this remarkable series of translations from mostly classical Arabic literature into modern English. Speaking to the Al-Ahram Weekly in a 2018 interview, the editors said that 'the series is aimed at the general reader who may not know anything at all about Arabic literature or Arab-Islamic civilisation… [and is] intended to reach out directly to this readership, requiring of readers as little effort and occasioning them as little cultural and intellectual anxiety as possible in order to enjoy our books.' It has produced dozens of works of classical Arabic literature in hardback editions featuring newly edited Arabic texts and facing English translations. Many of these have been republished in English-only paperback versions aimed at readers not requiring the original Arabic texts and the scholarly annotations, the intention being eventually to produce English-only paperbacks of all the books. 'Our editions of the Arabic texts are aimed to reach out to readers of Arabic. These editions are authoritative, but they are not burdened with excessive annotation. All our translations will in due course appear in English-only paperback versions. We also produce PDF files of our Arabic texts and make them available on the Library's Arabic Website,' the editors told the Weekly, adding that the series aims to meet the requirements of multiple constituencies, from scholars to classroom use to interested general readers. It has established itself as including go-to English versions of sometimes hard-to-find classical Arabic texts in the same way that the well-known Loeb series has done for classical Greek and Latin texts with their facing English translations. Many readers of the Weekly will have followed the Library of Arabic Literature since its inception a dozen or so years ago. Even more will have been grateful for the opportunities it has provided to read intriguing works of early modern Egyptian literature in English translation. Roger Allen's translation of What Isa ibn Hisham Told Us by the early 20th-century Egyptian journalist Muhammad al-Muwaylihi appeared in the series in 2018, for example, allowing contemporary readers access to this satirical account of Cairo. Humphrey Davies's translation of the 17th-century writer Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded appeared in the series in 2019, with this satirical work pitting Egypt's rural population against its urban residents and including a scholarly commentary on a poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf. The Library has since returned to the mediaeval period, including by publishing new translations of works like the 13th-century scholar Najm al-Din al-Katibi's The Rules of Logic, a textbook for use in schools, and the 'hunting poems,' published as A Demon Spirit, of the 8th-century Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas. Both books contain introductions setting the works in the context of their time and containing useful hints about how modern English-speaking readers might approach them. While the poems of Abu Nuwas make significant demands on the reader – and of course also the translator – owing to their employment of elaborate and highly metaphorical language, curiously the demands of al-Katibi's textbook are in some ways more straightforward. His discussion of what is essentially post-Aristotleian logic will be intelligible to anyone familiar with the basics of the traditional subject, even if for modern readers his formulations are challenging. Hunting poems: The 8th-century Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas ('the one with the curly hair') has quite a reputation in Arabic letters, and James Montgomery, Professor of Arabic Literature at Cambridge University in the UK and the translator of the 'hunting poems' (tardiyyat), begins by reviewing it for contemporary readers. Abu Nuwas, he says, 'heretic, countercultural icon, brigand, court jester… ritual clown [and] justified sinner,' was 'arguably the greatest poet of the Arabic language' and at the very least was a virtuoso in the Abbasid poetic genres of 'panegyrics (madih), reunciant poems (zuhdiyyat), lampoons (hija), hunting poems, wine poems (khamriyyat), love poems (ghazaliyyat), and transgressive verse (mujun).' Produced for the entertainment of the Abbasid elite – Abu Nuwas was a kind of court companion of the Caliphs Haroun al-Rashid and Al-Amin – his poetry 'never fails to delight, surprise, and excite,' Montgomery says, adding that 'what is most striking is its apparent effortlessness and the naturalness of its Arabic, despite the deployment of the full panoply of the new rhetorical style known as badi,' meaning 'modern' or even 'modernist.' Abu Nuwas's poetry is occasional, he adds, in the sense that it must be imagined as having been written for specific occasions to entertain the poet's aristocratic audience. Perhaps for those coming to the poetry from an Anglophone background, a comparison might be made to the work of the early 17th-century English poet John Donne, also a master of transgression and a writer of self-consciously 'modern' poems for a coterie audience. Montgomery has translated some 120 of Abu Nuwas's hunting poems including some of uncertain attribution. Most of them are short, perhaps a couple of stanzas long, and they are written in a highly charged poetic language. For those opening the book for the first time and wondering what makes a 'hunting' poem, Montgomery provides a useful explanation. The hunting poems are not descriptions of the act of hunting itself but instead are occasioned by it. Hunting of various kinds, always with animals such as dogs or hawks, was a favourite activity of the Abbasid elite for whom Abu Nuwas wrote his poems. He specialised in elaborate verbal pictures of the animals employed in the hunt, and one can imagine some of his poems being dedicated to prize specimens. Hunting was an occasion for ritualised display, Montgomery says, and at least for its human participants it does not seem to have involved much physical effort. For those whose idea of hunting, particularly hunting with dogs, is drawn from English foxhunting, Abbasid hunting seems to have been a rather sedentary affair, though not for the hunted animals. It mostly took place in the grounds of monasteries, where the human hunters would walk or ride about until prey broke ground, after which they would unleash hawks, dogs, or even cheetahs to bring it down. Abu Nuwas's hunting dogs are described as straining at the leash, their bodies tensed with expectation and nerves and muscles working together to leap upon their prey. 'The eye exults in his beauty,' Abu Nuwas writes of one hunting dog. 'The bright blaze / on his head, his white forelegs, fire-stick / thin, his long cheek, his scissor bite.' Of another, he writes of it 'pulling on the leash / like a lunatic terrified of needles / bolting from a doctor.' There is a rather jokey poem about a spider, also engaged in a form of hunting – 'this thing, this mean and despicable trifle / the colour of dark, muddy water, with its tiny back and chest … faster than a wink / or waking with a jolt, this thing scurries about / like a heady wine sprouting from an amphora / when broached.' Rules of logic: Najm al-Din al-Katibi's The Rules of Logic (Al-Risala Al-Shamsiyya), translated by Cambridge Arabist Tony Street, takes readers out of the entertainments of the Abbasid court and into the more earnest environment of the madrassas, the mediaeval Arab schools whose curriculum of philosophy and religion was in some ways similar to their equivalents in Europe. Aristotle was the philosopher most studied in the mediaeval European schools, and he was also the basis for the philosophical parts of the mediaeval madrassa curriculum in the Arab world, though as Street suggests this was Aristotle filtered through the work of the Islamic commentators. If one man can be described as having invented logic, broadly speaking the study of argument, it was Aristotle, and Aristotle's description of the field, inspiring the mediaeval logicians in both the Islamic and the European world, survived more or less unchanged until the last century when logic was developed for modern needs and almost completely rewritten by 20th-century logicians. Al-Katibi's Rules of Logic refers to the logic established by Aristotle, modified, in the Islamic case, by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and he begins with subjects and predicates of various types that provide the traditional groundwork for logical analysis. From there, following Aristotle, he moves onto the syllogism, attempting some classification of its different types with a view to establishing valid and invalid arguments. The treatise is divided into three parts, the first on terms and expressions, the second on propositions or sentence types, and the third on syllogisms and the rules of argument. Only if the premises are true can the conclusion of a syllogism be true, and al-Katibi sets out six forms of true proposition including those true by definition and those true by experience. He adds propositions true by 'intuition' and by 'widespread agreement,' while noting that experience, intuition, and consensus cannot yield certain knowledge. Only a syllogism taking propositions of these types as its premises can come close to yielding a true conclusion, he says, adding a list of uncertain propositions that people may nevertheless use in argument. These include 'endoxic' propositions –statements taken as true because it is convenient to do so – received propositions – arguments from authority – and suppositional propositions –jumping to conclusions. A syllogism 'built on these kinds of premises is called rhetoric,' he says, whose aim is to 'exhort the hearer' and does not have truth as its goal. As for propositions whose truth value is indeterminate – he gives the example of 'wine is liquid ruby' – their only value is in poetry. Propositions that claim to be true neither by definition nor by experience – his example is 'beyond the world is a limitless void' – are either false or meaningless. An argument built on such premises 'is called sophistry, and its goal is to silence or deceive an opponent.' Street says that while it can never be known why logic became a core subject of the mediaeval madrassas, 'there can be no doubt that [its] utility for analysing and justifying legal reasoning was a major consideration.' Even if some religious scholars 'regarded the broader logical tradition with suspicion,' owing to its non-religious origin, 'they were prepared to include the Rules among texts unobjectionable to pious concerns.' 'Few of the Rules's readers went on to formulate knowledge-claims in the propositional forms listed in the Rules,' he says, 'and still fewer went on to deduce new knowledge-claims using the inference-schemata' provided by al-Katibi. 'But all would have come away… with an appreciation of the many pitfalls of building an argument in natural language.' Abu Nuwas, A Demon Spirit: Arabic Hunting Poems, trans. James Montgomery, pp 432, Najim al-Din al-Katibi, The Rules of Logic, trans. Tony Street, pp179, both New York: New York University Press, 2024 * A version of this article appears in print in the 6 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
See - Sada Elbalad
26-07-2025
- See - Sada Elbalad
Jewelry and Adornment of Libya: A Comprehensive Chronicle of Heritage and Craft
Waleed Farouk Libya boasts a rich heritage of traditional jewelry and adornment, yet very few resources have explored this legacy in depth. With the release of 'Jewelry and Adornment of Libya' by researcher Hala Ghellali, this academic gap has begun to be addressed seriously. The book provides a significant contribution on multiple levels. A Personal Vision Turned into a Scholarly Reference Hala Ghellali, the author, is Libyan by origin and grew up in Tripoli, where she first encountered silver jewelry as a young woman when her father took her to the souq to buy silver bracelets. These personal memories became the starting point of her book. However, her academic and cultural background is far broader: she studied in Tripoli, continued her education in France, and later lived in Italy, Egypt, Syria, and finally the United States. Her deep interest in Libya's tangible and intangible history—ranging from poetry and proverbs to motifs and beliefs—clearly shaped years of field research and specialized documentation in the field of jewelry and adornment. A Multi-Language, Multi-Source Reference One of the book's key strengths lies in its richness of references. It meticulously documents its sources, drawing from Arabic, Italian, French, and English materials, while explicitly stating which silversmith contributed each piece of information or anecdote. This rigorous research approach elevates the book to the level of an academic reference, setting it apart from earlier works such as 'Libyan Jewellery – A Journey Through Symbols' by Elena Schenone Alberini (1998), which provided a bibliography but lacked detailed citations. This diversity of sources results in a comprehensive work that provides readers with a full social, cultural, and historical background, offering a deeper context for understanding jewelry beyond its visual appearance. Part One: The World of Silversmiths The book begins with three chapters dedicated to the history of Libyan silversmithing, delving into unprecedented detail about jewelry production—from archaeological evidence and travelers' diaries to trade records that reveal pricing structures and patterns of buying and selling. Among its notable examples is the close connection between Jewish silversmith communities in Tripoli and those in Djerba, Tunisia. These regional links—later disrupted by colonial borders—produced a strong cultural and artisanal exchange, to the extent that much southern Tunisian jewelry bore hallmarks originating from Tripoli. The chapters also explore guild organization, traditional techniques, and terminology used by both Muslim and Jewish artisans, while analyzing how political and economic developments shaped the industry over time. Special attention is given to the topic of hallmarks, explaining their evolution during and after the Italian colonial period, and clarifying the differences between official assay marks and personal maker's stamps. Part Two: Jewelry from Head to Toe The middle section contains ten full chapters that present different types of jewelry—from headpieces to waistcoat buttons, belts, anklets, and decorated slippers. Each item is listed with its local name, along with poetry, proverbs, and popular song excerpts, as well as explanations of their linguistic origins and symbolic meanings. The book does more than merely describe objects—it offers glimpses into daily customs, beliefs, and the occasions associated with each piece. Photography plays a central role here, featuring unpublished images from private collections and archival photos showing how these ornaments were actually worn. Part Three: Wedding Traditions in Tripoli The final section documents adornment customs in Tripoli's engagement and wedding ceremonies, illustrated with vintage photos of real-life celebrations. This is a valuable contribution, preserving traditions that are fading as lifestyles change. Racing Against Time to Save Memory The epilogue highlights the challenges Ghellali faced while creating this work. Beyond limited access to archives after 2011, there was an even greater obstacle: the rapid disappearance of the last generation of artisans and women who still remember pre–World War II customs and songs. To preserve this intangible heritage, the book includes an appendix listing the names of Tripolitan silversmiths and goldsmiths. Even though their full biographies or hallmark stamps require future research, recording their names is itself an act of cultural preservation. Glossary and Critical Notes The book also features a four-page glossary of jewelry terms in Libyan Arabic, making it a valuable tool for researchers. From a reviewer's perspective, minor suggestions include adding a map to show the geographic locations of the mentioned cities, providing stronger archaeological evidence to support interpretations of symbols like the 'Tanit triangle' or 'cross-in-circle,' and reconsidering the use of green font for quotations, which may affect readability. However, these are stylistic issues that do not detract from the book's significant scholarly value. A Landmark Resource for Researchers and Enthusiasts Although the author clarifies that her intention was not to create an exhaustive catalog, 'Jewelry and Adornment of Libya' sets a new benchmark for studies of Libyan traditional jewelry. With its extensive sources, deep analysis, and precise documentation, it is far more than a display of ornaments—it is a living record of the social, cultural, and historical world in which these pieces were created. read more 15 Ludicrous Cosplay Costumes That Will Blow You Away Watch... 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